Still More Snot chapter 2....The Snot Report

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=============================== Chapter 2, below ================== The way that they sellect people for interviews and hiring these days is changing and this should interest you. This note is a digest of an article from the WSJ, Tues, March 1, 2005, page B4, enbreastled "Large Firms Increasingly Rely On Employees for Job Referrals" by Jessica Mintz. There are interesting trends, not all good.

"Employee referrals accounted for a third of new outside hires, says the study CareerXroads, a recruiting-strategy consulting firm in Kendal Park, N.J.. The Internet came in a close second, with most successful candidates applying through the companies' own web sites. Hiring was up 10% last year over 2003, and 62% of positions were filled by external candidates." or, 38% were hired from internal candidates

sidebar: "Internet boards have left recruiters with hundreds of resumes for each opening"

"Employee referrals increased to 32% last year from 23% in 2001...."

"In large companies, resumes are stored in databases, and recruiters use keywords and other technology to narrow down candidates before they begin reading. In that sea of names, resumes with employee referrals get more attention...."

Some points to notice: i) when your resume goes into those databases, you don't know where its going to end up. It may be sold to larger databases like ChoicePoint (in recent news because of idenbreasty theft), or shared with consortiums of other businesses (this is also already happening), ii) it becomes a reference point for background checks if a resume is submitted years later by a person with the same name (you?) and it can be used to tell how much you may have "embellished" your recent resume (this is important, particularly, since there have been reports in the last few years of people submitting resumes with credentials that could not be verified), iii) you will never know the criteria used to "discriminate" against you (databases are available with criminal records, settlements, court information, background checks, medical histories, insurance claims histories, credit ratings, your religious and political preferences, your age important in age discrimination, visa status if you are an immigrant, this actually helps to name a few, from which decisions may be made to pbutt over your application). They may even be determining to how many other companies you applied to and were turned down and if that is a high number, even that may count against you. I have read articles that report that there are small companies going out on the Internet and web sites and making databases of people who post on newsgroups or make websites dealing with company malfeasance and advocating political positions (these will get you marked as a troublemaker) and then sell this "private detective" information to big companies.

At Sprint Corp it was only "Three years ago, only 8% of the ... company's hires were attributed to employee referrals; in 2004, that number was 34%" and they hired 13,000 people in 2004 and put 1.4 million people into the database (can you do the arithmetic to see what the applicant to job ratio was in this case?).

"Finding someone inside the company who will walk your resume into the recruiter or hiring manager's hands, or submit your name to an employee- referral database, can increase by 70 times the likelihood of being interviewed and hired...."

For some large companies, an applicant needs to answer a questionaire and they say this weeds out a lot of people right from the start.

The article had many other hints and reports dealing with how "the system" goes about "filtering" applicants to generate a short list for interviews.

============================== Chapter 1, below ================================ On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, straydog